Candlelight II

Silverpoint heightened with white gouache
10 x 14

A return to the candlelight theme here today. This is one of those things that practically drew itself, once it got started at least. It had a rather inauspicious beginning. I do all the hard drawing on regular paper with a plain old everyday pencil. Once I'm satisfied with the basic line drawing I'll transfer it to the prepared silverpoint paper. I wish I could tell you that I'm good enough to do it all right on the final grounded paper, but I can't. Deal with it, I have. You've got to remember that the grounds are pretty fragile and you can't erase a silverpoint line. Anyway, after I'd transferred the drawing I noticed a charcoal smudge right off the end of her nose. Being that it was charcoal I could just erase that, except as it turned out the eraser was a little on the dirty side, and it left and even worse smudge than I'd started with. I've tried to correct things like that in the past, and found out that the best way of dealing with it is to cut your losses and start over from scratch. So I had to trash this before I'd even started. Glad I started over.

Wading

watercolor
22 x 15

Today's offering is a watercolor. Watercolors can be tricky little things. To be really good you need to do a lot of them. That's pretty much true of everything. Can't be good without putting in the time to get there. It seems to be particularly true of watercolors though. There's so many little things you need to keep in mind. For certain effects the paper has to be at a certain degree of wetness. A little too wet it won't work, a little too dry it won't work, and the only way to know when it's at that correct point is experience. Unfortunately you have to keep at it or you lose a lot of what you've gained. Lots of little tricks too. Again though if you take some time away from the medium you forget the little tricks.

That being said, I need to do more watercolors or forget about it completely. Can't see me giving it up completely though. I like watercolor too much. I think I actually prefer it to oil.